The AMD Radeon RX 480 Preview: Polaris Makes Its Mainstream Mark
by Ryan Smith on June 29, 2016 9:00 AM ESTPower, Temperature, & Noise
Given AMD’s focus on power efficiency with Polaris – not to mention the overall benefits of the move to 14nm FinFET – there is a lot of interest in just how the RX 480 stacks up when it comes to power, temperature, and noise. So without further ado…
When it comes to idle power consumption I'm posting the results I've measured as-is, but I want to note that I have low confidence in these results for the AMD cards. Ever since the GPU testbed was updated from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, AMD cards have idled 3-5W higher than they used to under Windows 8.1. I believe that this is an AMD driver bug – NVIDIA’s cards clearly have no problem – possibly related to the GPU tested being an Ivy Bridge-E system. In this case I don’t believe RX 480’s idle power consumption is any higher than GTX 960’s, but for the moment the testbed is unable to prove it.
Traditionally we start with gaming load power before moving on to FurMark, but in this instance I want to flip that. As a power virus type workload, FurMark’s power requirements are greater than any game. But because it’s synthetic, it gives us a cleaner look at just GPU power consumption.
Among AMD’s cards, the RX 480 is second to only the Radeon HD 7850 in power consumption. Even then, as a GCN 1.0 card, the 7850 is one of the last AMD cards without fine-grained power states, so this isn’t a true apples-to-apples comparison. Instead a better point of reference is the GCN 1.2 based R9 Nano, which has a 175W TBP. Compared to the R9 Nano we find that the RX 480 draws about 30W less at the wall, which almost perfectly translates to the 25W difference in TBP. As a result we can see first-hand the progress AMD has made on containing power consumption with Polaris.
However things are a bit more mixed under Crysis 3. RX 480 is still near the top of our charts, and keeping in mind that higher performing cards draw more power on this test due to the additional CPU workload, the RX 480 compares very favorably to the rest of AMD’s lineup. System power consumption is very close to R9 280/380 for much improved performance, and against the performance-comparable R9 390, we’re looking at over 110W in savings. Hawaii was a solid chip from a performance standpoint, and Polaris 10 picks up where that left off by bringing down the power consumption to much lower levels.
The drawback for AMD here is that power consumption compared to NVIDIA still isn’t great. At the wall, RX 480 is only about 10W ahead of the performance-comparable GTX 970, a last-generation 28nm card. 1070FE further complicates matters, as its performance is well ahead of RX 480, and yet its power consumption at the wall is within several watts of AMD’s latest card. Given what we saw with FurMark I have little reason to believe that card-level power consumption is this close, but it looks like AMD is losing out elsewhere; possibly with driver-related CPU load.
Moving on to idle GPU temperatures, there’s little to remark on. At 31C, the RX 480’s blower based design is consistent with the other cards in our lineup.
Meanwhile with load temperatures, we get to see the full impact of AMD’s new WattMan power management technology. The RX 480 has a temperature target of 80C, and it dutifully ramps up the fan to ensure it doesn’t exceed that temperature.
With idle noise levels RX 480 once again posts a good result. At 37.8dB, it’s in good company, only meaningfully trailing cards that idle silently due to their respective zero fan speed idle implementations.
Finally, with load noise levels, RX 480 produces middling (but acceptable) results. Given that we have a mix of blowers and open air coolers here, the RX 480 performs similarly to other mainstream blower based cards. The $199 price tag means that AMD can’t implement any exotic cooling or noise reduction technologies, though strictly speaking it doesn’t need them.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
449 Comments
View All Comments
D1v1n3D - Friday, July 1, 2016 - link
I think it is funny did all these Nvidia people forget what 970 landed on cost wise and then the limped along 3.5gb ram. AMD has many more models to come for instance the GDDR5X models and the hbm2 models AMD is just bringing in cash flow off a very capable mid-range card i will be buying one for my mini itx that currently is running 1gb 6950hd talk about an upgrade and at such an amazing value and allowing me to not stress my 450w PSU you guys and your unrealistic crossfire the latency alone would drive me up the wall to much fluctuation from so many sources gpu x 2 and cpu. maybe when it's two hbm2 cards crossed maybe the latency will be nonexistent.currently waiting for fm2+ refresh I sure hope they have one more before fm3/+ boards come out.
monohouse - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
it's a prayr-view, pray for AMD !monohouse - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
"Wise gamers" ? is such a thing even exists ?, do you know I play Doom 2 on a GTX 780 Ti ? so what ? more graphic resources are never a bad thing, I also play many DX9 games on windows XP so what ? a technologically fast video card benefits not only the bloat-filled spyware-infested windows 10, it's also good for accelerating old software (that is, if you can make it work / are given drivers to make it work)monohouse - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
but now that you mention smart gamers ? this is how I see it: there are 2 types of gamers:the first type are the ones that don't know what they are going to run on the system, their load is variable and they jump from one game to another, never knowing which game they will run next because they wait it's release
and the second are the ones that do know what they will run ahead of time and will not run anything but what they know
I classify them as static and dynamic types of gamers, so the RX 480 is it good or not good ? the question in my opinion is more complex than it seems, because I believe that there is more to video cards than just performance watts heat noise and price, you have to look at the bigger picture, at things like OpenCL (and you know that AMD are pretty good at that), at things like hardware quality (how precise is the graphic calculation) (which is also a department where AMD is better (usually, excluding the brilinear filtering of the 9600XT) and also have to look at image quality produced by the card(s), also look into stuttering (if there is any, and how much) all these aspects are just hardware related, but hardware does not exist on it's own, it exists together with driver, so not less important than looking at hardware quality is also software quality (a department which is usually pretty bad with AMD) how stable is the driver ? is there any BSOD ? is there any rendering bugs ? and of corse the performance of the driver.
how does this relate to type of gamers ? consider it: you know what you are going to run in the card, it could be a OpenCL program or some very specific games - then all you need is to find out how the card (with it's driver) is handling this specific load - and based on that decide if you want to buy/use it
but for the dynamic gamer this is much more complex because there is no way to predict what the software/load is going to be, so the decision is more difficult whether or not to buy, so here is my way:
static gamer buy what suits your load, if RX 480 can run your OpenCL/games well enough, stable and fast enough looking good then you have no problem to buy it
but for dynamic gamer I have to disagree on all the posts mentioned here, and all the estimationing cliche "1080p gaming", there is no line you can draw and all games having an equal load at a given resolution, there is no such thing as "this card will last me 2 years at 1080p", for the dynamic gamer this strategy is flawed, because nobody knows the future (that being said, console generations do have an impact because modern games are console games) and in addition some games are pre-built for a specific FPS target, and game engines are differently designed. so for the dynamic gamer I would not recommend RX 480, because it's performance already struggles with games that exist in the present, so for the dynamic gamer the best bet is the highest performing card (only under the condition that it runs every already released game at higher than the required FPS for you)
K_Space - Saturday, July 9, 2016 - link
Apologies for reading your comment so late, however it is was not posted under the parent thread:1) why wouldn't wise gamers exists? :) "the gamer self" does not exist in vacuum, a wise human who plays games is a wise gamer.
2) your analysis of the static vs dynamic gamer is really well put, though your use cases are broader, so user is more apt than gamer (and really fit with the gamer does not exist in a vaccum statement earlier). You have put plenty of caveats that we almost essentially agree: whilst no one can predict the future precisely, one can certainly develop some foresight by looking at trends/as well as typical use scenarios to predict future use cases. It's what IT departments do all the time anyway, "wise" gamers are no different :) Just as you'd predict after DX11 was released that most if not all AAA games will feature the buzz word tessellation, you would rightly predict that with the current gen of consoles future AAA games will be more VRAM heavy than current ones. multi core CPUs will be utalised more than they would in current DX11 games, etc. Ditto with the 1080p statement, if im planning a future GFX purchase I'd factor in if I'm considering to stick to native 1080p display or a denser display and act accordingly. By your definition a dynamic gamer does not know what their future games will demand, but their interests are typically static even if the games change; thus if hypothetically speaking i likes MOBA or indie games I'd hazard a good guess that a 480 and not a 1070 card is what I need for future indie/MOBA games. Remember, these "predictions" don't need to be pin point accurate, just something that will get me to my next upgrade cycle.
3) RTG has been quite spectular with their driver support releases. previous GCN cards have been reaping these benefits to this day. I've the additional benefit of retroscopy in considering how they promptly dealt with the 480 powergate fiasco.
dmark07 - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
I'm a little confused as to when benchmarks were performed for the NVIDIA 1070FE card. The only articles on Anandtech for this generation of NVIDIA cards only has benchmarks for the 1080. I wish your team would have written an article about the 1070 first before adding numbers for them to this article. As it appears, this either indicates someone used the 1080 numbers and labeled them as 1070FE or this was a biased move with unpublished numbers that could have been pulled out of thin air... This is very uncharacteristic of Anandtech. Don't get me wrong, I've been looking forward to a full breakdown of the 1070 but the Anandtech team use to stick to the standard of performing a write up on a card prior to using benchmarks for that card in comparisons.Ranger1065 - Tuesday, July 5, 2016 - link
Speaking as someone who has happily visited this site for many years, it's clear the Anandtech "team" is not what it used to be. I'm tired of visiting here only to NOT find the reviews I'm interested in and so I visit Anandtech less and less frequently. It's a shame because I know the staff are capable of writing really good reviews but my patience and faith in Anandtech is just about exhausted. Other sites may not have the detail that Anandtech does (if and when they actually post a review) but the difference is not huge and at least they do actually post reviews that people care about.Murloc - Tuesday, July 5, 2016 - link
this is not a scientific publication, they can put whatever "unpublished" numbers they want in there.But yes, the issue is that they've become slow at posting and are unable to solve the issue.
Keinz - Tuesday, July 5, 2016 - link
Each and every time I bother reading the comments I'm reminded why free speech for the dumb is a very, very, VERY bad thing.beast6228 - Wednesday, July 6, 2016 - link
Too bad you didn't add the r9 295x2 to the benchmarks it would have destroyed most of the cards.